Joy Ride

Susan Stroman puts “Bullets Over Broadway” on Broadway.

“I’m really happy when I’m immersed in the art of it all—immersed in the music, the dance, the visual. Tapping into joy—it saves you,” Stroman said.Credit Photograph by Pari Dukovic

By nine-thirty in the morning on Martin Luther King Day, a blustery Arctic wind had emptied West Forty-second Street of most pedestrians, but on the neon-lit fourth floor of the New 42nd Street Studios the mood was the opposite of frigid. It was the first day of work on a musical adaptation of Woody Allen’s 1994 movie “Bullets Over Broadway,” a high-spirited story of gangsters, showgirls, and theatre, set in Manhattan in 1929, just before the crash. (The show opens at the St. James, on West Forty-fourth Street, on April 10th.) Susan Stroman, the show’s director and choreographer (Allen wrote the book), had arrived early for a ten-o’clock call and was inspecting a miniature model of the set, designed by Santo Loquasto. Two weeks before, she had taken two dance assistants to a rehearsal studio and, using them more or less the way a sculptor would use clay, had danced all the characters and “worked out the landscape of movement and all the set changes.” “So I absolutely know how the show moves,” she said. Nonetheless, she was feeling a kind of parental anxiety. “When it’s just me and my assistants dancing and singing in a room, there’s no nervousness. It’s just art pouring out of you. But now you have the responsibility of passing that on to the actors and also protecting them and being there for them. So there’s an extra energy.”

A stickler for research, Stroman had prepared a twelve-page information packet for the dancers who had been called for Day 1. In the packet was a glossary of terms, including “Greenwich Village,” “bohemian,” “Prohibition,” “gangster,” and “flappers,” along with citations for the show’s visual influences. To give the cast a taste of the playground of New York in the twenties, Stroman had inserted a couple of pages from the May 23, 1929, issue of The New Yorker: “A Conscientious Calendar of Events Worth While.” Because “Bullets Over Broadway” is also set in Woody Allen’s world, there were thumbnail explanations of references to Kant, Rousseau, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Aristotle. The handouts sat on a Formica table at the entrance to the rehearsal hall, beside a set of black script binders, fanned out flamboyantly like a royal straight flush. Chairs had been arranged in two semicircular rows around the director’s table, and Stroman’s show Bible—a folder, fatter than a quarterback’s playbook, that held her script, her notes, her scene-by-scene breakdown of the cast’s exits and entrances, the traffic plan of each musical number, and her e-mail exchanges with Allen—stood on a music stand, in front of the empty seats: the Book of Broadway, from which Stroman would soon begin to preach the gospel of good times.

Stroman, who is fifty-nine, has blond hair, a round open face, high cheekbones, and a ring-a-ding smile. “She puts joy on the stage because it’s in her nature,” Hal Prince, who hired Stroman to choreograph his brilliant 1993 revival of “Show Boat,” said. “She is a shiny person.” Being sensational is Stroman’s business. The credo attributed to her childhood idol, Fred Astaire—“Do it big, do it right, and do it with style”—is hers, too. She has choreographed such long-running hits as “Crazy for You,” a musical featuring the work of George and Ira Gershwin (1992; four years, 1,622 performances, and the first of five Tony Awards), and Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” (2001; six years, 2,502 performances). From 1994 to 2003, she choreographed Alan Menken and Lynn Ahrens’s “A Christmas Carol” spectacular, which packed the Paramount Theatre at Madison Square Garden every year. She was also the first woman to choreograph and direct a full-length performance at New York City Ballet. An homage to silent films, “Double Feature” (2004), two fifty-minute dances set to the music of Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson, remains among the most popular programs in the repertory.

Stroman’s appearance on the scene, in the nineties, revitalized Broadway storytelling after a dismal decade dominated by dance-challenged British musicals. Where Jerome Robbins’s dances had brought athleticism and line to Broadway, and Bob Fosse’s had brought iconoclasm and style, Stroman’s choreography offered wit and raise-the-roof rambunctiousness. The secret to her musical game is transitions—how people enter and exit, how the characters interact with the set, how the story is told through the swift shifting of spatial and emotional gears. For the song “Slap That Bass,” in “Crazy for You,” for instance, the chorines became bass fiddles, and in the show’s sensational first-act finale the miners of Deadwood, Nevada, learned rhythm from Broadway showgirls, who pulverized their prospecting pans and were swung around on mining picks. For “Springtime for Hitler,” in “The Producers,” Stroman invented pigeons with swastikas on their wings, and in “Along Came Bialy,” in the same show, a crowd of lusty old coots danced through Little Old Lady Land with their walkers. Even in last year’s “Big Fish,” an adaptation of the Tim Burton movie, which failed to please the critics, Stroman, who directed and choreographed, managed a couple of unforgettable moments, including a circus fantasy, during which three behemoth elephants shook their backsides and tap-danced. “There’s a part of her, a secret well of joy, that she doesn’t let the world touch,” Mel Brooks said. “It’s there in her work.”

At the New 42nd Street Studios, Stroman was dressed in her director’s uniform: black shoes, black pants, black tunic. Her clothes, like everything else in her life, are designed to make her more effective at her job; she strategically plays down her looks and plays up the “worker bee,” as she describes her style. “You can’t think about yourself when you get dressed. You can only think about what you’re working on here,” she said. Even her nickname, Stro, by which she is almost universally known on the Rialto, conjures up a kind of hail-fellow, de-feminized image, which for years she encouraged by wearing a baseball cap and a ponytail.

Pondering the stage picture that ends the first act of “Bullets,” Stroman reached into the model set, pulled out a plastic cup full of characters, and fished out a figurine of Olive, a showgirl who longs to be a Broadway actress and gets her gangster sugar daddy to buy her a starring role in a lame Broadway play. Then Stroman picked up a toy-size crimson-and-gold railroad car and put it on the set. “Over here is the end of Act I,” she said. “A big train comes on and we see the principals in each window. At the end, of course, girls are tapping on the very top of the train. Then there’s a girl hanging off the back in an Art Deco pose. Just wonderful.”

Toting water bottles and scripts, the ensemble began to clatter into the room. Stroman excused herself. “I’ve got to go hug everybody here,” she said. When the cast were settled in their seats, she stood to rally the troops. “Happy New Year! What’s better than starting it with a Broadway show?” she said. One at a time, the performers gave their name and the number of Stroman shows they’d done. Before they were sent off to sing through the score, Stroman instructed them on the inspirations for the dance movements they’d be perfecting over the next three months. “You know, when I say to you to make this more turned in, this way, more like a stick figure—that’s based on John Held’s photos and cartoons of that time,” she said, holding up a John Held, Jr., cartoon of two knock-kneed Charleston dancers from her information packet. She continued, “On page 4, there are a lot of Erté images. I know we always say to the ladies, ‘You’re hitting an Erté pose.’ So that’s what you’re hitting when you see that. Also the Vargas girls, the famous Vargas girls from the twenties. You know, in ‘Tiger Rag,’ when you’re sitting on the floor, there are a lot of poses there that are based on the Vargas girls. The whole show is immersed in that time period, choreographically.” Then it was time for the ensemble and the musical director to go to work. Stroman left them to it.

Room 7-B, on the seventh floor of the New 42nd Street Studios, is dedicated to Stroman’s late husband, Mike Ockrent, a British director, who died of leukemia in 1999, at the age of fifty-three. His motto, “Rehearsal is the best part,” is emblazoned, along with his name, on a plaque beside the door. When Stroman works on the seventh floor, before the start of every day she runs her fingers across the deeply indented letters of his name. “It feels like a sculpture in your hands,” she said.

The two met in 1991 and collaborated on “Crazy for You,” which Ockrent directed. “When Mike left to go back to London, I swear I didn’t feel anything or know anything,” Stroman said, as the “Bullets” chorus, down the hall, belted out “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.” “He was my director at that time. He went to London—” She broke off. “I’m going to cry,’’ she said. She wiped her eyes, then continued, “He called a couple of weeks after we’d opened and said he had to come back. I said, ‘Why is that?’ In my mind, I was thinking there was a problem with the understudies, or why else was he coming back? He said, ‘I have to come back because I’ve fallen in love with you.’ I thought, Well, let’s start dating. We’ve been through a tech together, so now I know everything about this man.”

Intimacy requires equality; Stroman and Ockrent teamed up when both were in their artistic prime, and each had expertise to offer the other. The curly-haired Ockrent, who had studied physics at the University of Edinburgh, was well spoken, well read, and well informed; his sophistication and encouragement pitched Stroman’s professional ambitions higher. “He was her Henry Higgins,” said David Thompson, who wrote the book for five of Stroman’s musicals, including “The Scottsboro Boys” (2010), her bold, minimalist experiment with social comment. “Mike got Stro to start looking at what the theatre could be from a different perspective, to look at herself as a bigger artist.” For her part, Stroman made Ockrent laugh. Throughout their time together, he left mash notes for her around the house. “I know I made him happy,” Stroman said. “I was an American girl who was kind of curious, a little bit loud, in his mind, funny and optimistic.”

The pair were married in 1996, and Stroman, who had lived in a dark basement apartment on the Upper West Side, found herself in a penthouse on Fifty-seventh Street, configured around a cozy farmhouse-style kitchen to cater to Ockrent’s culinary inclinations. (To this day, Stroman rarely applies heat to food. “I order in well,” she said.) One day, Mel Brooks knocked on the door, launched full voice into a rendition of “That Face”—“That face / that face / that fabulous face!”—danced down their long corridor, jumped on the sofa, and said, “Hello, I’m Mel Brooks.” By the end of the meeting, he had hired Stroman to choreograph and Ockrent to direct “The Producers.” In the middle of their planning, however, Ockrent fell ill. “He was very determined—it was not like the kind of thing where he knew that he was on a fast track out,” Thompson said, recalling how he and Stroman had smuggled a cake into Sloan Kettering for Ockrent’s birthday. “And then he died. I think the surprise of it upended Stro’s world.” After that, Stroman said, “I didn’t feel like working, and Mel came over, kind of stormed in. And he said, ‘Look, I really want you to direct and choreograph this.’ And he said, ‘You’ll cry in the morning, and you’ll cry at night. But when you’re with me during the day you will laugh. And that will save you.’ It did.” After Ockrent’s death, Stroman bought a bench in Central Park, on Literary Walk, near the statue of Robert Burns, whose birthday they had celebrated every year. In commemoration of their New Year’s wedding, the bench’s plaque refers to Burns’s most famous song: “Dear Mike, ‘We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet, for Auld Lang Syne.’ Love, Stro.”

In 2005, Stroman directed and choreographed a movie version of “The Producers,” working with the seasoned Hollywood editor Steven Weisberg, who had edited such films as “Men in Black II” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Three years later, Weisberg came to New York for a job and asked her out to dinner. “After the third time, I thought, I wonder why he’s asking me out for these meals,” Stroman said. “I’m not going to make another movie. I’m only involved in the theatre. And then he walked me home and planted a big kiss on me. And he said, ‘You’re not the boss of me anymore. So now we can have a real relationship.’ ”

Weisberg was tall and handsome, with a lively interest in literature and jazz. Two years later, he moved into Stroman’s penthouse. Stroman playfully referred to him as “an old hippie.” “He was laid back and not precise,” she said. “Very different from me, and very different, of course, from Mike.” Weisberg would occasionally overlook Stroman’s birthday or turn up late for dinner—forgivable lapses—but after he almost drove her into oncoming traffic and lost important footage in an Avid editing suite, she took him to see a neurologist. Tests revealed that tragedy had found her again: at fifty-five, Weisberg had early-onset Alzheimer’s. “Once he was diagnosed, we got closer,” she said. “I think because I realized that all those times that he would forget Christmas, or New Year’s, or my birthday, it had nothing to do with his not loving me.”

Over the next couple of years, various film friends stayed at Stroman’s apartment to help her take care of Weisberg. “I know that those last years with me were wonderful years for him. I made them wonderful. But it was clear he needed something more,” she said. Last September, during the vexed production of “Big Fish,” Stroman moved Weisberg back to Los Angeles, into an assisted-living accommodation, with twenty-four-hour care, where he could be supported by his Hollywood network. “It was devastating to say goodbye,” Stroman said, looking down at her hands. “As of about last week, he doesn’t remember me.”

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In many of Stroman’s musicals—“Crazy for You,” “Contact” (1999), the 2000 revival of “The Music Man,” and even the film “Center Stage” (2000)—song and dance are dramatized as redemptive: they resuscitate dead communities and resurrect the downcast. What was petrified now flows. Contriving a schedule that allows her to stay as much as possible in “the ecstatic moment,” as she calls it, Stroman has turned to the musical as her own Rx for heartbreak. Her dance card for the next year includes “Little Dancer,” a Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty musical (at the Kennedy Center, in October); “Take Five, More or Less,” a ballet set to the music of Dave Brubeck (at the Joyce, also in October); and “The Merry Widow,” at the Metropolitan Opera (starring Renée Fleming, opening New Year’s Eve). “I’m really happy when I’m immersed in the art of it all—immersed in the music, the dance, the visual. Tapping into joy—it saves you,” Stroman said.

Stroman has been tapping into joy since the age of five, when every night, for at least an hour before dinner, her father, Charles—an appliance salesman during the week and a pianist at local watering holes on weekends—sat at the upright in the den of the family’s modest house, on the outskirts of Wilmington, Delaware, and worked his way through the American songbook, while Stroman danced on the linoleum floor. Sometimes her soft-spoken Irish-Catholic mother, Frances, would come out of the kitchen to sing along. Musical talent ran in the family. Charles’s mother, Ella, was also a fine pianist, who for years accompanied the silent films at the Loews Theatre in Wilmington. And Stroman’s brother, Corky, who was eleven years older and the self-proclaimed “black sheep” of the family, was already touring with his own trio when Stroman was a girl; he ran a night club in Puerto Rico for years.

As a salesman, Charles traded on his ability to instill confidence. “The only thing you really need to make it is a bottle of Listerine and a thesaurus,” he told Stroman. He burnished his life story with tall tales, in which he was the hero of every improbable escapade. “Everything was a sale. Everything was big and grand and outrageous,” Debbie Bouma-Moore, Stroman’s best friend since her teen-age years, recalled. “If he told me a story, I would have to assume that it was false.” A child of the Depression, Charles took pride in being self-made. “He had talent, but he never had the dream of becoming a professional musician,” Stroman said. “He wanted to have a home, to send a daughter to college.” (Stroman majored in English at the University of Delaware, graduating in 1976.) Still, he encouraged her to take chances. “What’s the worst that can happen?” was his mantra. (He was less supportive of Stroman’s younger sister, Debbie, who wasn’t as musical. “He doted more on Susan, almost as if he knew she was going to be successful,” Debbie said. “He actually pushed me around a bit and called me some foul names.”)

From an early age, Stroman visualized music. “I imagined it filled with a cast of people and costumes and lights,” she said. “I would dance and make up songs and stories and play characters. I was that kid. If I hadn’t become a choreographer and a director, I would have just gone crazy with the visions.” Although she was taking dance classes by the age of six, her focus was on creating, not performing. When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies came on television, the family would sit mesmerized on the sofa, Stroman recalled, “as if we were watching gold pour out of the television set.” Even then, she recognized that music supported choreography. “I knew that when Fred Astaire turned or jumped in the air, so did the orchestra,” Stroman said. She also understood “how he would structure his dance steps almost like a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

At John Dickinson High School, Stroman donned the blue-and-white school colors as a baton twirler, adept at toss turns, double and triple turns, around-the-world, and choreographed her crew for halftime shows. “I think that’s why I’m so good with props,” she said. “I can catch the baton behind my back and everything.” At home, she cocooned herself in dreams of movement, covering her bedroom wall with a decoupage of phrases and photographs, so firmly affixed that the entire wall had to be removed when the family sold the house, in the eighties. Between images of Fred and Ginger dancing “Pick Yourself Up,” Rita Hayworth on a giant piano keyboard, Degas’s “Blue Dancers,” and dancing ducks, Stroman pasted up such quotations as “Life is a cabaret,” “I have a place where dreams are born, and time is never planned,” “Feeling groovy,” and, from Martha Graham, “All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”

The summer before their senior year of college, Stroman and Debbie Bouma-Moore took a trip to San Francisco, where they were going to house-sit. They arrived in style, in a black Cadillac Eldorado convertible that a local car company needed delivered to the Bay Area, but soon ran out of money. “All we had left in the house was bread and jello that we put on the bread,” Bouma-Moore said. Walking along Fisherman’s Wharf, Stroman noticed the many buskers working the busy sidewalks: a trumpet player; a man in a refrigerator box, billing himself as “the Human Jukebox,” who’d sing a song if you put a quarter in a slot. “I thought, O.K., we could do this,” she said. “We went from musician to musician. Nobody wanted us,” Bouma-Moore recalled. Finally, they came upon a man playing a guitar with a drum on his back, cymbals on his knees, and a harmonica in his mouth. “How would you like two blondes dancing in front of you?” Stroman asked him. The girls went back to the house, put on their tap shoes, and worked up five routines “that could go with any song he could possibly play,” Stroman said. Performing under the sobriquets Lindsey and Sunny—Bouma-Moore’s nickname for Stroman—they earned around eighty dollars a day. Their act became so popular with tourists that the police were frequently called to clear the sidewalk, and local entrepreneurs made buttons featuring their beaming faces. At the end of the summer, they were spotted by scouts for the “Tonight Show,” who flew them to L.A. and planted them in the audience for a talent segment. Tap-dancing in the aisle to the tune of “Little Brown Jug,” Stroman won a steak dinner and her first national attention.

In March, 1977, at twenty-two, Stroman drove from Wilmington to New York for her first professional audition: she was one of three hundred dancers competing for three places in a revival of Vincent Youmans’s 1927 musical “Hit the Deck,” which was being produced by Goodspeed Musicals, in East Haddam, Connecticut. By then, Stroman was choreographing at community theatres in Wilmington and teaching at a local dance studio. “It wasn’t enough. I was itching for something more, and it wasn’t coming to me,” she said. Stroman, who had been to New York only once before, found Times Square frightening. “I was a goon magnet walking down the street,” she said. “I remember being amazed at the number of dancers in the rehearsal space.” That night, she saw “Pippin,” her first Broadway show. She returned home, not expecting anything to come of the audition. The next week, she got the job. She sold her red Opel GT and, that June, set off to start her life in show business, at a hundred dollars a week.

Stroman’s departure was “a huge struggle,” according to Corky. “My parents were afraid that ‘real’ show business might hurt me,” Stroman said. “They saw that music did not help my brother. When he left town, he strayed down the wrong path.” But, she added, “when you dance off the stage you are always leaping into darkness. I needed to take this leap into darkness for real.” After Goodspeed, Stroman made a beeline for Manhattan, rented a one-bedroom ground-floor apartment on West Eighty-first Street for two hundred and thirty-five dollars a month, and then went home to pick up her things. The last item she loaded into her U-Haul was her father’s small red piano.

Within six months, Stroman was touring as a dancer with the national company of Kander and Ebb’s “Chicago,” directed by Bob Fosse, and starring Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera, and Jerry Orbach. For interested cast members, Orbach held a weekly acting class, where he preached the gospel of stage focus, which became Stroman’s credo, too. “You have to remain in character when you’re singing and dancing and acting, throughout the whole piece,” she said. Perhaps the best example of her fierce concentration is “Trading Places” (1983), a showcase at the Equity Library Theatre, which Stroman devised with Jeff Veazey, her lanky dance partner of four years. In the heart-lifting piece, Stroman and Veazey play two film-obsessed fans who re-create the work of famous dance teams—Astaire and Rogers, Danny Kaye and Vera Ellen, and others—in synch with projections of the originals. “Jeff and I would work at Jeff’s studio apartment,” Stroman said. “We danced on a piece of plywood that he kept under his bed. We would work out all the dance steps in a very small space. When we were able to understand the steps, we would rent a studio and dance through it.”

Stroman keeps on her laptop a three-minute clip of their rendition of “Begin the Beguine,” dancing in exuberant tandem with Astaire and Eleanor Powell. Projected onto two screens against a starry backdrop, Astaire and Powell tap nonchalantly into view. After thirty seconds, Stroman and Veazey skitter onto the stage and fall into breezy lockstep with the dancers above them. With the full skirt of her bias-cut dress billowing, Stroman is every bit Powell’s poetic equal, living both the joy of the dance and an almost platonic ideal of movement. Eventually, the music falls away, and the dancers dare each other in rhythm. With taps, claps, and dynamic changes of volume, the syncopation builds to a pinwheeling finale, whose thrilling commotion concludes with Stroman and Veazey on the same beat and in the same silhouette as Astaire and Powell. An extraordinary exhibition of concentration and control, “Trading Places” got Stroman and Veazey booked to demonstrate teamwork at many industrial shows. (Stroman had already begun to earn about eight hundred dollars a week choreographing shows for Ford, MetLife, and I.B.M., among others.) From Veazey, Stroman said, she learned about partnering. “There’s a push and pull when you partner, almost like a rubber band,” she said. “You become one, really, when you dance together.” But in 1988 Veazey died of AIDS, at the age of thirty-three. “Jeff’s death hit me hard,” Stroman said. She gave up performing: “I did not want to dance with anyone else. It was time to get on the other side of the table.”

Stroman had already begun the transition by choreographing, in 1987, an Off Broadway revival of Kander and Ebb’s 1965 musical “Flora the Red Menace,” for her friend the director Scott Ellis. (David Thompson rewrote the book.) Ellis and Stroman had first met as performers in “Musical Chairs,” a 1980 Broadway flop. “It was springtime, and we would sit on the stoop of the stage door of the Rialto and lament about how much we wanted to make the move to create for the theatre,” Stroman said. A few years later, at Ellis’s instigation, they plucked up the courage to approach Kander and Ebb and got permission to downsize “Flora” by staging the Communist love story as an amateur production at a W.P.A. Federal Theatre in the nineteen-thirties. The staging won “Flora” a new following. “We became this little family,” John Kander recalled. “And then they had an idea of doing a revue of our songs.” The revue, titled “And the World Goes ’Round,” which opened Off Broadway in 1991, ran for more than four hundred performances. “Flora” had brought Stroman to the attention of Hal Prince, who then hired her to choreograph “Don Giovanni” at New York City Opera. Liza Minnelli saw “And the World Goes ’Round,” and put Stroman in charge of the choreography for her show “Stepping Out at Radio City,” which was directed by Fred Ebb. In Radio City Music Hall’s plush lobby Stroman met Mike Ockrent for the first time. “It was a combination of the comedy in ‘And the World Goes ’Round’ and the show-biz extravaganza of Liza’s show that made him think I would be right for ‘Crazy for You,’ ” Stroman recalled. “He asked me right then and there if I would choreograph his show.”

Before the opening-night party for “Crazy for You,” on February 19, 1992, Thompson and Ellis went over to the Times office to see if they could get an early copy of the review. “We went to the party, and I knew I had this thing in my hand that was going to change Stro forever,” Thompson said. “I handed her this paper and just stepped back as she read.” The show was reviewed by Frank Rich, who began this way:

When future historians try to find the exact moment at which Broadway finally rose up to grab the musical back from the British they just may conclude that the revolution began last night. The shot was fired at the Shubert Theater, where a riotously entertaining show called “Crazy for You” uncorked the American musical’s blend of music, laughter, dancing, sentiment and showmanship with a freshness and confidence rarely seen during the “Cats” decade. . . . The miracle that has been worked here—most ingeniously . . . by an extraordinary choreographer named Susan Stroman and the playwright Ken Ludwig—is to take some of the greatest songs ever written for Broadway and Hollywood and reawaken the impulse that first inspired them. . . . Ms. Stroman’s dances do not comment on such apparent influences as Fred Astaire, Hermes Pan and Busby Berkeley so much as reinvent them. Rather than piling on exhausting tap routines to steamroll the audience into enjoying itself, the choreographer uses the old forms in human proportion, to bring out specific feelings in the music and lyrics. . . . Short of George Balanchine’s “Who Cares?” at the New York City Ballet, I have not seen a more imaginative choreographic response to the Gershwins onstage.

“It burned through the party,” Thompson recalled. “It just burned through the night.”

Stroman’s particular directorial gift—her ability to fill an empty space not just with people but with story—was there in embryo in “Crazy for You.” Her transition to director-choreographer, however, came seven years later, after a meeting with Lincoln Center Theatre’s artistic director, André Bishop. Bishop had seen all of Stroman’s work in the nineties and had been impressed. “The dances that she did had a narrative, and the dancers had characters,” Bishop said. “There was depth to them. There was an attention to detail in those dances that I had rarely seen in Broadway choreography.” He offered Stroman a commission.

Months earlier, Stroman and Ockrent had found themselves in a dive in the meatpacking district that was a pool hall by day and a swing-dance club by night. At one in the morning, the place was a scrum of black-clad dancers. “Into this sea of dark fashion stepped a girl in a yellow dress,” Stroman recalled. “You couldn’t help but notice her: it was a very bold color to wear at night—lemon yellow—the same color you find on a traffic light. When she wanted to dance, she would step away from the bar and some man would ask her to dance.” Stroman continued, “I was obsessed with watching her. I knew she would change some man’s life that night.” From that single image, Stroman developed “Contact.” The dance was too short for an evening, so she added “Swinging,” a sexy capriccio based on Fragonard’s “The Swing,” and “Did You Move?,” about a woman rebelling against the control of her abusive husband. The triptych, titled “Contact,” which the Times called “an endorphin rush,” became Lincoln Center Theatre’s longest-running production at the time. Neither a ballet nor a musical, “Contact” was sui generis, a novelty that was first billed as a “dance play.” Although it had about five minutes of dialogue, its stories were told almost entirely in movement to recorded music. (The American Theatre Wing invented a “Special Theatrical Event” category after “Contact” won four Tonys.) “When the show was a hit, I went back downtown to find the club,” Stroman said. “It had been demolished. So the girl and the club had disappeared—like Brigadoon.” Stroman, however, was now uniquely visible as a female director-choreographer on Broadway.

Stroman had never met Woody Allen when the producers called her, in April, 2012, to see if she would be responsive to his material. “People who knew her told me she was a pleasure to work with, very creative, and had a wonderful sense of humor,” Allen said. “She had worked very well with Mel.” Allen had scuppered all previous proposals to turn “Bullets Over Broadway” into a musical. “He hates the new music for shows, the new composers,” his sister, Letty Aronson, one of the lead co-producers for “Bullets,” explained. “So I said, ‘Look, we can use the existing music of the time.’ ” Then, according to Allen, “a light bulb went off.” Allen and Stroman worked together on the fifth floor of his Upper East Side town house. “We would take the stairs, because he won’t go in the elevator,” Stroman recalled. “We worked in the children’s playroom. We sat on children’s chairs at a low children’s table.” Stroman’s knowledge of the American songbook and her expertise at juggling music and dialogue made Allen a believer. “I would be rattling off songs that I thought only I would know, but she knew them all, and knew songs that I didn’t know,” he said. “She was ultra-meticulous about wanting to make sure that every song advanced the plot.” The musical of “Bullets” has a straighter story line than the film and, because of the song and dance, is also more dynamic. “My wife prefers this to the movie,” Allen told me.

On the morning of January 23rd, the nine principals made their first appearance in the “Bullets” rehearsal room for the meet and greet, a ritual of Broadway that is a cross between a kaffeeklatsch, a pep rally, and a shareholders’ meeting. (“I’ll see you at the meet and greet, but I hope I don’t have to meet or greet anybody,” Allen had e-mailed Stroman beforehand.) Well-dressed investors picked their way through the rows of wooden chairs toward a lavish smorgasbord of breakfast foods. Producers hobnobbed with actors. Theatre owners chatted with leggy chorines in full makeup, with high heels and bright smiles. Zach Braff—who plays the aspiring playwright forced to cast a gangster’s tootsie in order to finance his play, only to discover that her minder, a galoot called Cheech (Nick Cordero), is the one with the genuine literary gift—wandered the room with practiced nonchalance, in a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. Stroman mingled and beamed and posed for a photographer. Success was in the air: the musical’s story was tight and tested, the songs were classics, cleverly massaged, and Stroman, the doyenne of Broadway dazzle, was at the helm. “When it works, it’s like the oil business,” the producer Roy Furman said to the nabobs from the Jujamcyn Theatres, which owns the St. James. The word “gusher” was heard.

When Allen arrived, looking as if he’d walked out of an Orvis catalogue—brown pants, olive work shirt, tan all-weather brogans—Stroman ushered him toward the model of the set and talked him through her box of scenic tricks. Allen listened intently with head bowed and hands clasped behind his back. “She knows the field much more than I know it,” he’d told me earlier. “I could do it in the movies, but she’s the one on the stage. It’s really Susan’s show, ninety-five per cent.” He bent to scrutinize the set as Stroman explained how it would transform from one scene to the next: the sprung furniture that would allow would-be lovers to bounce Chagall-like across the stage for “Let’s Misbehave”; the Erté proscenium, with niches for “living sculpture”; the revolving stage, which would be used to re-create the gangsters’ rampage through the theatre at the finale. “That never would have occurred to me,” Allen said. Then, after a few minutes of being passed around to various high rollers like nuts at Christmas, he politely took his leave. Stroman stayed behind to address the crowd.

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“I couldn’t be more excited about the design,” she said, as Santo Loquasto and the costume designer William Ivey Long flanked her. “We’re going to just show you some things in tandem—I’ll do interjections—but I’m going to pass it off. Hit it, Santo!” Stroman’s openness turned the occasion from a business chore into an entertaining instrument of consensus. After Loquasto and Ivey Long had done their part, she turned the spotlight on the chorus. When she got on the subject of gangsters, she pointed to a strapping young dance-ensemble member in the third row—Casey Garvin, whose grandfather’s uncle was Michael (Trigger Mike) Coppola, of the Genovese family. “I looked him up. He was Lucky Luciano’s hit man,” Stroman said. Casey smiled, swivelled in his seat, and nodded to the applauding audience. “He’s got a very secure job,” Stroman said. Then she sent the producers and investors back to their bagels and badinage, and she went back to work.

An hour later, the food and formalities finished, the chorus girls, now in tap shoes and clutching prop daisies, stepped toward the director’s table, where Stroman sat. “I’m Mary!” “Annie!” “Jeannie!” “Rose!” “Betty!” “Daisy!” “Olive!” they called out, and began to sing:

We’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.

We’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.

When you’re dead in your grave

No more women will you crave.

We’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.

As the dancers belted out the number and worked their routine, Stroman scrutinized the line, seeming to listen as much with her body as with her ears. Her shoulders moved to the rhythm; her hands kept up their own semaphore. Stroman is a taskmaster—“She’s in my pantheon of fanatics, guaranteed,” Ivey Long, who has collaborated with her on twenty-eight shows, said—but she is exacting without being persecuting. At one point, she moved into a corner of the room with her arms crossed, shuffling her feet as she imagined a new step. At the end of the number (“We’ll be gay and merry / At your obituary”), the chorines were meant to exit blowing kisses. Stroman, back in her seat, leaned forward. “Kiss with the middle finger,” she said. For a few minutes, the dancers tried to perfect their mordant farewell. Stroman stopped them again. “Blow it off your hand,” she said, standing up to demonstrate. “No, not here—get it way out here. Five, six, make a kiss. Flat, yeah, so the kiss flies right out of your hand.” Next, she attended to the chorus’s wagging fingers as they scolded the rascal with “You know you done us wrong, you rascal you.” “Some of you have just gone down and then gone down, down, down,” she said, letting her pointed finger droop. “Don’t just go down. My finger goes up, up. Take your whole arm with it. My hand’s going to move a little bit, but my focus is on my finger.” Then, getting in front of the mirror with her dancers, Stroman said, “We’re looking down this way, so out, out, step, hit it!” The dancers reran the moment. “Looking good,” she said. “Better, better!”

“You Rascal You” is a night-club routine performed at Nick’s Place, which is owned by Nick Valenti, the palooka whose girl wants to be a star. Valenti is played by the hulking Vincent Pastore, better known to the universe as Big Pussy, in “The Sopranos.” Pastore, who carries with him his own saturnine atmosphere, was leaning against a wall, watching the rehearsal and rolling an unlit cigar between his thick fingers. He seemed bemused at the hubbub of Stroman’s blocking. She waved him over as two thugs practiced rushing across the room with a fedora-clad dummy lying face down on a gurney under a bloodstained sheet. “You are the set change,” Stroman explained to Pastore, whose face was a mask of puzzlement. “As soon as the music stops, I say the line?” he asked. “Yes,” she said, putting her arm through his and steering him toward the piano. “It’s a musical. Wait for the music,” she said. The pianist played the scene in: the corpse was rushed across the room, and Pastore waited for the music to stop, and then, in his deep, sludgy voice, announced, “He tripped!” The room exploded with laughter. “Love it!” Pastore beamed. “All right!”

On February 1st, a week after the meet and greet, the production was temporarily thrown off balance by what the producers began to refer to as “the Situation.” Allen’s estranged daughter, Dylan Farrow, published an open letter on the Times Web site, repeating allegations of sexual abuse by Allen that had first been raised at the time of a 1992 custody suit. The piece came out on a Saturday, and that Monday morning Stroman convened the cast. “We never go into the personal lives of those around us,” she recalls saying. “We don’t know anything about personal lives—we only know about talent. We’re here to put on a show, and we’re here to talk only about the show.” Stroman never broached the subject with Allen. “We have no small talk. He’s never asked me anything about my personal life, and I wouldn’t ask him anything about his,” she said. “For us, this collaboration has always been about the work. This is my work. This is William Ivey Long’s work and Santo Loquasto’s work. This is the work of the actors. This is the work of an entire team of people who love what we do.” Nevertheless, Farrow’s letter set off a wave of media scurrility that cast a long shadow over the prospects of Allen’s latest movie, “Blue Jasmine,” at the Academy Awards, as well as over the Broadway opening of “Bullets.” Ultimately, Cate Blanchett’s performance in “Blue Jasmine” won her the Best Actress Oscar, and the “Bullets” box-office was also unaffected. On February 7th, Allen published a rebuttal in the Times, which Stroman said calmed “any kind of fear that anyone might have had.” In the early days of the brouhaha, she asked the producers about advance ticket sales. “I was told they were steady and growing,” she said. “After that, I stepped on the gas.”

At the St. James Theatre five weeks later, Stroman sat on a blue padded bench stretched across the armrests of several seats in Row H; this allowed her to see over the large slanted director’s table in front of her, where yellow Post-it notes were lined up like rows of corn. “Tonight we’re running Act II with music,” she said, pulling her hair high above her head with both hands.

The theatre was only two city blocks from the rehearsal room, but it had taken five laborious tech weeks to get the fun machine of “Bullets Over Broadway” up and running there. Stroman, who keeps a hawkeye on every production detail, had even kept watch over me, issuing periodic e-mail bulletins:

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Woody . . . loved the new numbers. He even left smiling. I had to laugh at one scene—when I asked him about changing a line—he started to cough—I asked him if he wanted some water (which was sitting in front of him) and he said in his Woodyish way, “No, let me struggle. I like to struggle.”

Can you tell I’ve been up since 5:30? Just excited about the tech. Can’t wait to get there. As each set unfolds, it’s like . . . a big present rolling towards you downstage.

I am heading to the sitzprobe now. That is the first time the cast hears the orchestrations and meets the band. . . . I talked Woody into coming. . . . I bought some Snickers bars. He always loves to have a Snickers bar when he visits.

The sitzprobe was amazing. I was going to try to find another word, but I can’t. . . . I am sure I am the first and only person to tear up at “Tiger Rag”! When those opening chords were played, the past two years of meetings and ideas and collaboration came flooding into my brain. Now there was a musical where there never was a musical before. Woody was very happy. He would spontaneously applaud, but quietly under the table.

As the designers fiddled at their computers, Stroman studied the show curtain, which bore an image of high-stepping chorines, their tilted bodies jousting with slide trombones. “When the curtain comes up, I have the girls in the same pose,” she said. “I was inspired by Santo.” She drifted down to the lip of the stage to consult with her musical supervisor, Glen Kelly, and with Marin Mazzie, who plays Helen Sinclair, a diva who is trying to manipulate the playwright, David Shayne (Braff), into beefing up her role. Sinclair’s seduction of Shayne is performed to the Bessie Smith belter “I Ain’t Gonna Play No Second Fiddle”; to give the vamp more drive and drama, Stroman upped the tempo and adjusted Mazzie’s delivery, instructing her to give a lusty sigh at Braff’s touch. Where Mazzie had sung “ ’Cause Mama don’t sing / And Mama don’t swing / For a man who won’t let her play lead,” she was now down and dirty: “ ’Cause Mama don’t Uumph / And Mama don’t Unnh / For a man who won’t let her play lead.” There were whoops of approval from out front.

Stroman, according to Kelly, “rules by niceness.” She also rules by being extraordinarily organized. Her office, which is on the tenth floor of her apartment building, is decorated entirely in black and white, a startling tabula rasa, with a white Formica desk, stacked with legal pads and pencils, at its center. “I wanted the room to have no show posters or anything in it that would take my mind off the particular project I was doing,” she said. Everything is arranged so that she has to think only about dance: “Having things organized—water bottles lined up, surfaces clear and clean—is about keeping distractions to a minimum so I can stay focussed. I feel like I lose time and energy if I have to rummage for a pencil or a cup of tea.” Likewise, when she gives notes the emphasis is on eye contact, on making her ideas felt without the impediments of paper and pen. As she speaks, the associate director, Jeff Whiting, stands just behind her with a wedge of index cards, like a quiz-show host. When Stroman has covered a point, Whiting fields the note and hands her the next card. After the session, he copies her notes in a legible hand and slips them under the actors’ doors. On a hard day, an actor may get as many as ten cards under the door.

The day of the first preview—March 10th—was uncharacteristically warm, the kind of sudden release after a long winter freeze that is always good for comedy. “It’s an omen,” Allen recalled thinking as he left his house that morning. For the pre-show tune-up that afternoon, he sat to Stroman’s left at the director’s table. Stroman, who looked tired, set out two Snickers bars for him, as if to say that it was going to be one of those days. The previous night’s dress rehearsal, in front of an invited audience, had been a disaster: because of a faulty stage elevator, the show had had to stop for twenty minutes. “It was ragged,” she said. “We lost what little audience we had.” Worse, the company had missed its chance to calibrate the show to the audience’s reactions. For the actors and the crew, the preview that night would be their first real test.

Slumped in his seat, Allen watched as Stroman adjusted the lighting on the bullet-riddled corpse as it was wheeled through Nick’s Place. Over the mike to the lighting designer, Donald Holder, Stroman requested “a low glow, as if we’re heading somewhere but we don’t know where yet.” She added, “I want the club later.” The fix worked: now, as the corpse was wheeled offstage, the night club loomed into view, a surprise for the audience. “The fluidity with which she makes things go from scene to scene is amazing,” Allen said. “I would be so lost. For me, it would be like a day at the Strategic Air Command.” When Allen had a query, he leaned over to Stroman with the tact of a butler. “I’m not suggesting this, but did anyone feel that the first act is too long?” he said. “Yes,” Stroman replied with no hint of defensiveness. “Is there anything that can be done about it?” Allen asked. “I’m doing it now,” she said, showing him some nips and tucks in the script. “You go in and carve,” she said. “Cuts are always good,” Allen said later. “Good riddance!” With only an hour left to tweak before the cast had to get ready for the evening’s performance, Allen’s main concern was the balance of story and song. “I want to try to bring the book a little more forward,” he said. “The music is a little loud, and so the audience misses some of the lines.”

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At 7 P.M., the weather was so mild that the Naked Cowgirl was posing for photos in a black bikini at Forty-fourth and Broadway. A line had already formed under the marquee of the St. James. Onstage, the actors were gathered in a circle around the two lead producers, Aronson and Julian Schlossberg, who told them to “win one for the Gipper.” Stroman worked her way up the aisle to her catbird seat in the back row. After the fiasco of the dress rehearsal, she was nervous for the actors. “I want them to be able to tell the story without worrying about anything else,” she said. Allen had also arrived early, accompanied by a towering young female Italian assistant—a sort of sequoia of solicitude. “Voodee, the doors are opening,” the assistant said. For a moment, Allen panicked, uncertain whether to take his aisle seat or to bolt to a private room up in the mezzanine. “Aaah!” he dithered, then hightailed it up the stairs, returning to join Stroman at curtain time.

The cheering began with the show’s first beat, as a spray of machine-gun bullets spelled out the show’s title in white lights, and it never really stopped. Mazzie belted, Braff squirmed, Cordero menaced, Pastore was dopey and deadly, and even Trixie the Pomeranian got her laughs on cue. The sight gags, which had been miniature notions a month earlier, were now huge comic realities: the dancing hot dogs in “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll,” the sprung chairs that lent surreal hilarity to “Let’s Misbehave.” Stroman’s signature piece of showmanship was “Runnin’ Wild”—the rollicking finale to Act I, in which all the ricocheting characters and their desires came together, as the chorus girls skittered around the stage in black hot pants and red conductor caps and tap-danced on top of the railroad car.

During the performance, Stroman occasionally leaned over and put her head in her hands, as if embarrassed. But it was shock that she was feeling. “I couldn’t believe the roar of the audience,” she said later. “I think we did our job.” At the finale, the cast launched into “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a goofy anthem for the evening’s caprice and a song that rejects the negative: instead of admitting defeat at the lack of bananas, the number celebrates all that does exist—scallions, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, and, this being Broadway, blintzes, knishes, and chopped liver, too. As the actors congaed around the stage, the gleeful song played both as a refusal to suffer over loss and as gratitude for all that remains. At the curtain call, Allen rushed up the stairs toward his private room, but paused at the top. There, alone in the low amber light, he bent over the balustrade to gaze at the crowd standing to applaud. For a full minute, he studied the jubilation, then finally slipped away.

At midnight, Stroman was still there in the quiet auditorium, deconstructing the performance, figuring out cuts and light changes for the next day’s rehearsal. There was a month to go before “Bullets Over Broadway” had its official opening: time to find even more momentum, more laughter, more delight. Stroman, who has “shaken the hand of grief,” as Ivey Long put it, long ago dedicated herself to banishing gravity from the stage. For the audience and for herself, “Bullets” was a joy ride. “I try to choose joy,” she said. “It’s not easy. But even if we have no bananas we all have to keep going.” ♦

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